Demystifying RevOps in a Changing world

While you may have heard about RevOps, its true meaning and role may still elude you. We’re here to tell you how we do it at Spitfire Inbound.

Let’s start by looking at what RevOps is, and then move to how it works, and how it can make a difference in your organisation.

What is RevOps?

RevOps is a portmanteau of two words: Revenue and Operations. But it is, in fact, more than just that: RevOps is a business function that maximises an organisation’s earning potential, or profitability.

To maximise profitability, RevOps works to break down silos that may exist in your organisation between the marketing, sales, delivery and finance teams to achieve its true potential. It is a function in the business also focused on true customer experience and delight.

What makes it different from ‘regular’ Ops?

In the traditional sense, ‘operations’ has always been known as the more admin-centric roles of any organisation or company - much like procurement, leave management, asset management and even finance. What sets RevOps apart from this typical description of operations is easy - RevOps focuses on more than just ‘pure’ operational duties, bringing in the power of rich data, processes and perspective to empower your organisation to achieve so much more.

How can RevOps make a difference?

Think of RevOps taking an outside-in view of your business. First, you evaluate your strategy and messaging, then compare it with your systems, tools, approach and tech stack, and then determine how that translates into your execution, experience and sales performance - and based on the comparisons, you’ll look at data-driven solutions to improve and implement optimisations. THAT’S RevOps at its peak potential.

In essence, it’s all about improvement, optimisation and data.

At Spitfire, we’ve defined our RevOps pillars (and fields of evaluation and optimisation) as:

• People

We put our people at the centre of what we do. The ‘people’ pillar of RevOps looks after our employee wellbeing, happiness and all other aspects of managing people in a business.

• Process

Without processes, any business is doomed to fail. We’ve made our processes actionable and understandable for everyone. No complications - and there is ALWAYS room for optimisation. This pillar is around not only the development of processes but more importantly about using these processes. And ensuring that processes are not set and forget - perspective will give us insights to update and optimise.

• Platform

Continuous interrogation of our technologies and tech stack helps to improve our efficiency and insights - from meeting clients, to delivering on projects and more. We also never say no to new technologies. We will always interrogate, and make data-driven decisions on whether to move forward or stay where we are.

• Pockets

Typically, people would see this as the finance role. We’ve named it pockets, mostly because we can, but also because pockets usually carry money. This pillar supports all finance activities and roles and aims to improve our financial processes (and guide us on good financial decisions).

• Perspective

Underpinning the entire RevOps team is perspective. A pillar that offers unbiased opinions, data and hard facts as well as offering insights into competitors, reports and statistics across our landscape.

We are making a difference by using our pillars to nurture business growth, as well as providing seamless, quality delivery supported by technology. We’ve positioned our processes as a safety net internally, as well as made them actionable and understandable. 

By combining all of these, we will increase job profitability and provide clarity for our team on accountability and expectations on each project we tackle.

What RevOps can do for your business?

In a word, business growth! As our Financial Manager, Boitumelo Jwere, says, “RevOps sounds like an alignment of sales and revenue goals to achieve best results through the customer life cycle.”

Here are the main outcomes RevOps works to achieve at Spitfire Inbound: 

• Seamless, quality delivery supported by technology: This is the biggest one! It’s not enough to have a seamless sales process; your business also needs to operate smoothly for delivery and this is where RevOps can make a big difference. 
• Process internalised as a safety net for all staff: With clear processes come clear expectations and a set of “guard rails” to keep staff not only feeling safe, but also on track to deliver top tier quality. 

• Actionable & understandable processes: As we highlight above, ensuring your processes are actionable and best of all, understandable, helps to ensure success. 

• Profitable jobs: We know that feeling - you’re so keen to deliver award-winning work that sometimes you lose track of the SLA with client and what the actual scope of the agreed-upon work is! With RevOps, a keen eye for profitability helps keep your business above water while you do your best work. 

• Clarity for staff on accountability & expectations: So important for company morale is helping your hard-recruited and well-trained employees know what’s expected of them and when they exceed that. RevOps will help you clarify these crucial parts of the work to keep your business thriving. 

In short, RevOps is what your business needs to go from “working just fine” to thriving with smooth execution of work, content employees, and best of all, happy customers.